Strange

How do you know they are?

As this is an illusion (i.e. there is no way of knowing that the person actually re-experienced their life or just thought they had) any questions about it seem moot. Maybe they don't have those feelings. Maybe they just remember having had those feelings. Maybe they don't experience or remember it at all. Maybe they just think they did.

Sounds remarkably similar to this post: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/96016-ultimate-infinity/#entry928391

So maybe this is the answer Mike is looking for: Spacetime is made of "Magic FooFoo", which is a completely undetectable material about which we know nothing and, because it is undetectable, cannot know anything. So, Mike there you go. Magic FooFoo is the answer. That is what curves when we talk about gravity. You are free to invent any properties you like for this material as long as they do not make it detectable. So if you want it to be coloured, then it can be Invisible Magic Pink, Invisible Magic Blue or any other similar colour. Its density can be whatever you like, as long as you can think of a reason why it is always measured to be zero. Its velocity can be whatever you like, as long as you can think of a reason why it is always measured to be zero. Are you happy now? You can have a bucket of Magic FooFoo (which is indistinguishable from any other empty bucket) and play with it to your hearts content.

It is not nothing, although it is a near vacuum. For example interstellar gas has about 1 atom per cubic centimetre. There are probably a lot more photons and (maybe) neutrinos per cubic cm. Space may be full of "stuff" but that is not relevant to the question of how distances and time are affected by mass. (Apart from the fact that some that stuff has mass.)

Not really. I am old enough to be your father (or maybe grandfather!) and have almost no formal qualifications beyond a couple of college-level diplomas. Most projects are. That doesn't seem relevant to patentability. Although it suggests you will need a team with all the right skills to develop the product.

It is almost impossible to follow your posts. Is your project to develop some hardware product that can be manufactured and therefore needs patenting?

Strictly speaking you are supposed to have a working product. I think this would only matter if someone challenged the patent and the court asked you to demonstrate it working. I don't think patent examiners ever ask for a demonstration. Although if you tried to patent a time machine, they might do ... (Also worth noting that the USPTO will automatically reject anything that looks like a perpetual motion or free energy machine.) If you are thinking of his thousands of experiments to find the best light bulb filament as an example then you could file a patent for the concept before completing all of that research. As long as you have proved that the basic technology works. You could then file another patent for the best version(s) of the technology when the research is completed. Manufacturers are constantly filing new patents for improvements to their products.

There is nothing patentable there. If you develop some new machine or device as a result of this process then that device can be patented. Note that getting a patent means that you will have to publish full detail about how it works. One of the difficult things is writing the patent so that someone cannot just change one small bit of the device and then claim it is different from your patent.

If you have children, you would know that why = why2 (defined recursively). def why(x): a = answer(x) print(a) why(a) return

What sort of projects are you talking about? Are we still talking about patents? Most patents are not specifically scientific. They are more likely to be technology based. I can't really think of something purely scientific that could be patented. Theories and discoveries cannot be patented. Only the application of them can be patented. Patents were originally intended to protect "devices" or things that could be manufactured. Some countries later extended this to software. But in many jurisdictions software is not patentable (by itself).

To some level, yes. So we can talk about thunder as a noise created by electrical discharge. If we take the simplest bit of that (ignoring the complexity of why an electrical discharge should create noise): Why do we hear noise? Well, we can say that noise is a change in pressure in air. And that the pressure is caused by atoms bouncing off one another (crudely). But why do atoms bounce off each other? Well, they have electrons which have a negative charges and, as we learnt school, like charges repel. Why do like charges repel? Well, um, er, they, you know, ... fields and er ... quantum electrodynamics .. feynman diagrams, and you know, virtual photons and stuff.... At which point I would refer you to the video of Feynman being asked about magnetism and explaining why he can't answer the question. At some point, "why" is always doomed to fail.

Whatever. You said pegs in the ground. Great: stick with those. Those are you end points. Now, when you measure the distance between them, you don't need there to be any "stuff" there to define the distance. We were told, when we were at school, that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. So we assume that when we measure the distance between those pegs that we are measuring a straight line. Well, it turns out that they lied to us (and our intuitive view of the world is wrong). The shortest distance between two points is not necessarily a straight line. So when you measure the distance between those pegs, the distance you measure may follow a curve. You keep insisting that the world matches your view of how it should be. Our intuitions about the world are often wrong. This is one example.

If you google "pop singers discovered on youtube" you will find many examples who have promoted themselves this way to start their careers. And the biggest selling novel of recent years started out as Internet fan fiction.

Yes, patents are issued by governments. In the case if the USA they are managed through the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). I think you are very unlikely to get a response to a casual enquiry. They are very busy - it is hard enough to get a response to a formal application! If they do respond, it could take months.

About 100 tons of dust fall on the Earth every day. This is, as studiot says, a minute amount. Overall, the Earth loses a tiny amount of mass each year. A nice analysis here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16787636

You have the markers at the end points. There is no need to anything in between.

The other variable is gravity. How about writing to NASA and saying you want to be artist-in-residence on the International Space Station?

So 3141.6M(Outer) is 3.1km? What units are you using?

Interesting question. The strobe thing was the first thing I thought of. I think there are a couple of things that might explain more about this. One is the speed at which the pixels are read out of the sensor (they have to be read serially). This could account for some of the remaining blur - the position of the wing will be slightly different when the fist pixel is read from when the last is read. (It may be that modern sensors store all the pixels as a single "snapshot" before they are read out. But this isn't a technology I know much about.) The other is the one you say: the rate at which the viewfinder is refreshed. This might be 24 fps simply because that is simpler if the camera can also shoot video. I have never seen either of these figures in camera specs so you might need to write to Nikon (customer support) to find out - send them a cool picture to grab their interest!

How about gelatin or agar-agar?

Do you have local venues that have "open mic" nights; i.e. where anyone can turn up and perform? Or a local talent contest? Or you could try busking. I know people who made more money from that than a regular job.

Distance. You measure a straight line between two points. You can measure a non-straight line between two points. Neither of those distances need to be made of something. Yes, it is.

You have not measured anything tangible. Is 1 mile tangible? Is 1 second tangible? Space is just the distances between things. Why do you expect it to be "made of" something?

I suppose there could be all sorts of things, but without any evidence, why would we imagine there is. The structures you suggest seem implausible for a number of reasons. I think something that large would be either be directly visible or detectable by its gravitational effect on nearby galaxies and galaxy clusters. What are the units here? Is "M" million? Million what? Megaparsecs? Millions of light years? Millions of kilometres? If the units are some human unit of measurement, why would they be multiples of pi? I can't answer that. But the red shift at that distance is very small (about 0.04). I am not aware that there are any audible frequency signals in the CMB. Do you have a reference for that? Or are you thinking of the acoustic waves that can be measured in the CMB? (Which describes how they were formed, not the frequency.) Can you explain what 1e20 cycles means? (Cycles of what?) No they are are bosons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_particle#/media/File:Standard_Model_of_Elementary_Particles.svg